U.S. Proposal to Bring Arabs and Jews Together for Direct Talks Defeated at Lausanne

May 26, 1949

LAUSANNE (May. 25)

Serious differences over policy in the ranks of the Conciliation Commission were climaxed today in a turbulent session in which the French and Turkish members voted down the United States proposal to bring the Israeli and Arab delegations here together for direct negotiations. This would seem to be the culmination of the long-smouldering dissension within the Commission.

Mark Ethridge, U.S, member of the three-nation body, asked why the Commission’s latest memorandum to the Israeli delegation here had taken five days for the journey from Room 5 to Room 300 of the Beau Rivage Hotel and its work consequently delayed from subsequent recrimination, it emerged that the French representative, Claude de Boisanger, present chairman of the Commission, had spent the week-end in Paris and had instructed the Commission’s secretariat here not to commit any transactions in his absence.

Simultaneously, Hussein Yahid Yaltchin, the Turkish member, announced that he was going to England immediately for ten days discussions with the Turkish Parliamentary party. Mr. Ethridge then inquired whether there were so few Turkish diplomats available that Mr. Yaltchin had to leave the work of the Commission for what was, in his view, little more than a glorified pleasure trip.

These and other developments have lowered the prestige of the Conciliation Commission to a point on which even the disputing Arab and Israeli delegations are agreed. Mulled. Pasha, Transjordan Minister of Defense, who is one of his country’s delegates, charged that the Commission had failed completely to fulfill its functions. It had not once seized the initiative, he said, as Dr. Ralph J, Bunche, U.N. acting mediator for Palestine, bad done. It had proposed nothing, he charged, and had done nothing to bring the parties together. Mulki Pasha added that he had today booked passage for home.

With these views of the Amman delegate, an Israeli spokesman today expressed wholehearted agreement. But he added that the Israelis are staying on at Lausanne to see what could still be salvaged.